


Long Multiplication

by elumish



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4109124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was one thing John didn’t count.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Multiplication

There was one thing John didn’t count.

\--

There was a game that he played with himself where he counted the number of touches he got in a day, then averaged it over a week, then over a month. When he was a child, he kept one count, all forms of touch being counted as equal.  When he got older, though, he started separating it out by amount of skin contact, by duration of the touch, by percentage of body that was touched, by whether the person was touching him intentionally or not. And then he joined the military and added another category to separate it out by: mission-necessary touch.

Meeting Teyla more than doubled the amount of non-mission-necessary touch he got in a week, and meeting Ronon doubled it again.

It was only much later, though, when he added a last category: whether he was touching them intentionally or not.

\--

One of the first things civilians asked when they found out he was military was how many people he had killed. And he never gave an answer, letting them think it was because he just didn’t want to talk about it. Which was true. But the other reason was that he didn’t know.

He had tried to keep count originally, not to make notches in his imaginary belt but because he needed to _remember_ , because he had taken their lives and they deserved someone to remember that that had happened. But the thing about flying planes and helicopters was that sometimes you were too high off the ground to keep count, and approximate numbers weren’t specific enough for him.

Because five people was different from ten, and he couldn’t forget those he could never count.

\--

Rodney had started playing the game of prime/not prime with him, and while it wasn’t counting, it was the same idea. He wasn’t a huge fan of the game as a game; it was too simple, and it got repetitive, because either the number was a prime or it wasn’t. There was no additional work that went behind it, nothing else to do with the numbers once that binary determination was made.

But the first time he played the game and saw Rodney’s eyes light up when he got one answer right, then two, then more and more, something within him lit up as well, because it was the first time in a long time someone looked at him and was impressed with him—maybe even proud of him—without wanting something to go along with it. His flying was impressive; fly somewhere more dangerous. He had a special gene; go ship off to literally the middle of nowhere to use it. He could do math; do my homework.

But Rodney didn’t want that from him, not about math. Rodney could do his own math, and better than John could. Rodney was just happy that someone else could do it too, and was willing to, and that was enough for him.

\--

John was really good at long multiplication. It was an odd skill to have, and not one that was particularly useful in everyday life, but it had come in handy when he was pursuing his mathematics degree. When people weren’t using calculators—and sometimes even when they were—it was the simple stuff that tended to trip them up, not the hard stuff. Calculus? Easy. Complicated division? Impossible.

It also translated into him being exceptionally good at combinations and permutations, because he could keep a whole bunch of numbers in his head without getting them mixed up.

Once, when he was little, he calculated every different outfit his mother could possibly wear with what was in her closet if one ignored the fact that there were some things that just should not go together.

\--

More people per capita died on the Atlantis than in any other military installation held by the United States—or other—military. A higher percentage of those were civilian than on any other international installation.

John knew the name of every casualty suffered under his command. He didn’t count the casualties, because he didn’t need to.


End file.
